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Jeanne-Claude

News about Jeanne-Claude, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times. More

Jeanne-Claude and her husband Christo began as radical artists in the 1960s. By the end of the 20th century they had become figures of the establishment. Jeanne-Claude died at 74 on Nov. 19, 2009, in Manhattan, where she lived.

Since the 1990s, the couple insisted on joint credit for their projects — stretching a 365-foot-high curtain across a valley in Colorado (1972), surrounding 11 islands in Biscayne Bay, Fla., with pink fabric (1983), and wrapping the Pont Neuf in Paris (1985). In 1995, they exhibited the artwork "Wrapped Reichstag," which was at once a work of art, a cultural event, a political happening and an ambitious piece of business. Each of these projects was an attempt to create art at monumental scale by temporarily transforming a natural or artificial landmark. They have all been spectacular visually, although another of the Christo projects — 3,100 gigantic umbrellas installed in Japan and California in 1991 — turned disastrous when a California storm uprooted one of the 500-pound umbrellas, which crushed a woman to death.

The artists enchanted New Yorkers in 2005 with "The Gates," 7,503 bright orange panels that flapped, rolled and waved over 23 miles of sidewalks in Central Park. Jeanne-Claude, whose hair was dyed a flaming red, seemed a combination of artist, major domo and P.T. Barnum.

She was born Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon on June 13, 1935, in Casablanca into a French military family. She was educated in France and Switzerland, later emigrating to the United States. Jeanne-Claude met her husband in Paris in 1958. At the time, Christo Javacheff, a Bulgarian refugee, was already wrapping small objects. Three years later, they collaborated on their first work, a temporary installation on the docks in Cologne, Germany, that consisted of oil drums and rolls of industrial paper wrapped in tarpaulin.